Battle of Zolochiv

The Battle of Zolochiv was a battle fought on the Eastern Front of World War I in 1916, when Russian and Central Powers forces battled for control of the Ukrainian town of Zolochiv. The battle was a pyrrhic victory for the Central Powers, who narrowly captured the Imperial Russian Army positions after a tough and costly battle.

The Russian forces defending the town were almost two-thirds Latvian riflemen, with five Latvian regiments forming the main portion of the Russian army and two regiments of frontniks and one cossack regiment also taking part in the defense of Zolochiv. The Central forces were diverse, consisting of three Imperial German Army regiments (one of them reservists), three Austro-Hungarian Army regiments, and the 3rd Brigade of the Bulgarian 42nd Infantry Regiment.

The main fighting occurred on the southern half of the battlefield, where the Russians and Central Powers engaged in a Western Front-style trench war. The Russians attempted to hold a fortified and sandbagged frontline observatory against repeated Central assaults, but they were eventually overwhelmed and forced back to the fortified sap. There, too, they came under strong assaults from the Central army, which pressed the Russians on the other fronts by taking the hilltop stronghold in the central sector. The Russians were forced to retreat to the barricaded road in the north and the observatory trench in the south, their last lines of defense before their headquarters, and Russian counterattacks were repulsed with heavy losses. However, the Central forces had also suffered heavy losses in the process, and their victory was a pyrrhic one; the Russians had initially come close to victory with their own assaults on the Central trenches. Ultimately, the Central Powers captured a few more meters of Russian territory, but at great cost.